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Squeal
I saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed—Marvin
Who spat out poems; Potrzebie
Who coagulated a new bop literature in fifteen novels; Alvin
Who in his as yet unwritten autobiography
Gave Brooklyn an original lex loci.
They came from all over, from the pool room,
The bargain basement, the rod,
From Whitman, from Parkersburg, from Rimbaud
New Mexico, but mostly
They came from colleges, ejected
For drawing obscene diagrams of the Future.
They came here to L.A.,
Flexing their members, growing hair,
Planning immense unlimited poems,
More novels, more poems, more autobiographies.
It’s love I’m talking about, you dirty bastards!
Love in the bushes, love in the freight car!
I saw them fornicating and being fornicated,
Saying to Hell with you!
America.
America is full of Babbitts.
America is run by money.
What is it Walt said? Go West!
But the important thing is the return ticket.
The road to publicity runs by Monterey.
I saw the best minds of my generation
Reading their poems to Vassar girls,
Being interviewed by Mademoiselle.
Having their publicity handled by professionals.
When can I go into an editorial office
And have my stuff published because I’m weird?
I could go on writing like this forever . . .
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— Louis Simpson.

I am the world's first yuppie poet! The poem is entitled "The Bottom Line."

'Money isn't everything,' they say.
Okay, so what is? Sex?
Did you ever make love to a pauper?
Pee-yoo!
Revolution?
It takes money to overthrow the government, you know.
Art?
The more it costs, the better it is.
And that's the bottom line!

I told Mom that Mad Magazine was Lit-a-choor.

I saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed - pot and alcohol and body lice
Scouring their health, emptying their eyes, turning their brains to pickle-flavored Jello,
Their radiant, youthful bodies carved by age into wrinkled escresences,
Stripped back to their bare essences of orifices and genitalia,
Their politics frozen in the icy grip of arrested adolescence,
Their minds - what were we talking about? Pass the Cheetos
I always vote Democratic. How 'bout you?

See? It's easy! Now if you damn bourgeoisie would send me a paycheck I could get back to partying and boinking coeds...